Textausschnitt aus dem Buch von Simon Kuper "Barca. The Rise and Fall.if the Club that built modern Football":

What makes Barça fans almost uniquely demanding is that winning isn't enough. They also demand beautiful attacking Cruyffian football. Thuram, who had come from Juventus, said, 'In Italy, whether you play well or badly isn't what's important. What counts is that you win. Here, even if you win 2-0 but there isn't spectacle, the spectators won't be satisfied.' Valdano told me that Madrid's fans had a different attitude: 'At Real there is an enormous passion for triumph. There's an admiration here for the player who gives everything. And there's also a desire for spectacle. But that's the order of things here. In Barcelona tha order is reversed. First it's the play, then the result.5

There is no expectation at Barça of supporters getting behind the team even when it's playing badly. The Camp Nou sets the standards; the players' job is to meet them. Guardiola, who understood socis because he was one himself, told the crowd in the stadium on the day his new squad was presented in 2008, 'It's a marvellous challenge for us to try to convince you.

The peculiar nature of the Camp Nou - giant yet unenthusiastic - makes a player's life at Barcelona still more demanding than at other giant clubs. When Ronald Koeman left Barça for Feyenoord in 1995, Cruyff mused, 'In one way, of course, you can understand it because at this level, in this climate, it takes so much out of you. 547 A retired Barcelona player once told Rosell, 'Sandro, when I was put on the bench, I was happy, because on the days when I was playing, my leg was shaking. Even Messi has said, 'It's not easy to step onto the field in the Camp Nou

The German goalkeeper Robert Enke's only season at Barça was ruined by a disastrous defeat to a third-division team in the Copa del Rey. He then sank into depression. After moving to Fenerbahçe, in summer 2003, he wrote on a sheet of hotel notepaper:

My year in Barcelona has changed me a lot. All the self-confi dence that I built up in three years in Lisbon has been taken away from me... I was always glad when I didn't have to play even in training games... In reality I was always relaxed and happy when I was watching from the sidelines. I'm also really scared of the opinion of the public, the press, and people's eyes. I'm paralysed by fear. 548

Six years after that, as recounted in Ronald Reng's biography A Life Too Short, Enke threw himself in front of a train. Every suicide has multiple causes, but Reng believes that the stress of football contributed to this one.

Even the almost incomparably successful and popular Iniesta said after leaving the club for Japan, 'Playing for Barça is not just playing a football match. It's a brutal pressure, constant tension, training perfectly every day, being the best in every match.' It was hard, he concluded, 'to enjoy it 100 per cent'.